Week 9: Experimental Breathing

The experiment has been conducted! Last Friday, my faculty advisor Ms. Bocchino was grateful enough to go into the third grade class and do the box breathing technique with them before they completed their assessment. I landed on doing this breathing technique because it was the simplest and most effective, and I think that doing the visualization would stray too far from the focus of the breath. I was unable to be in the classroom for the experiment because of COVID, but Ms. Bocchino filled me in on Wednesday during our weekly meeting. She told me about how they did the box breathing for about a minute and about how she detailed the movement of the stomach to the kids when they breathe. Ms. Bocchino then left the classroom, and the third graders then took their spelling test. I was able to see the results of the assessment and am happy to say that there are lots of 18/18s, but I have not gotten back the other third grade classes’ assessments, so I have nothing to compare them to yet. Even if there is no statistical advantage of doing the breathing exercises before the test, I still believe that there are various other situations in which one can benefit from focusing on their breath.